Luke French made a poor for impression for the Seattle Mariners after being acquired in the Jarrod Washburn trade, getting whooped on for 38 innings to close out the year.  He was so frustrating to watch that I was ready to never see him on Seattle’s active roster again.

I still don’t like him, but with an offseason to sit back and think about it, I dislike him a little less.  He’ll be just 24 years old next season, is dirt cheap and could turn out to be a solid back of the rotation guy for Seattle.

I’m intrigued by French.

Last season with Detroit and Seattle he was not very good and an extreme fly ball pitcher.  He had the eighth highest fly ball percentage in baseball for starters with at least 60 innings pitched.  He also had the seventh highest line drive percentage under the same parameters.  Given the high placements on those leaderboards, it’s no surprise that he also had the third lowest groundball percentage, getting beaten out of the bottom spot by just 0.2%.  High fly balls, high line drives and low groundball pitchers aren’t usually going to be very good.  Given those numbers, you’d wonder why Seattle would want anything to do with him.

But his minor league batted ball profile paints a much different picture.  For his minor league career (over 600 innings) he was 46.1% grounders, 36.1% fly balls and 14.9% line drives.  At the time of his callup in 2009 (84.1 innings) he was getting 42.4% grounders.

Groundball numbers are expected to drop slightly as a pitcher bumps up a level, but going 42.4% to 29.2% doesn’t exactly seem like a natural regression.  So what’s the deal?

It’s hard to say considering that we weren’t following him in the minor leagues, but French did apparently say on radio after the trade that he went through a dead arm period in 2010.  I have no idea how long that extended and if it had any ill effects even after he felt better, but it makes some sense that if his fastball lost some movement he could give up more flyballs on it.  It wouldn’t surprise me, given that the fastball we saw last year was hardly AAA quality, let alone good enough to throw to big league hitters.  It was soft and straight and boring and got hammered.  Was this his real fastball?

But without seeing enough of him to know what his groundball pitch is/was, it’s hard to say.

In the minor leagues French’s groundball rate was pulled up by complete domination against lefties, getting them to pound the ball into the ground over half the time in 2008 and 2009.  In the big leagues, that dropped to 36.1%.  Considering that his slider was, as I recall, pretty effective against left handers, and his other numbers look good against them (strikeouts up, walks down), I do lean towards thinking there is something wrong with his fastball.

I don’t know who we’ll see in 2010.  Based on his minor league numbers, it’s hard to imagine him giving up so many flyballs again next season.  If I was just looking at those numbers I might expect, at worst, a pitcher with near equal fly ball and grounder percentages.  But based on what we saw last season, I can’t imagine how he could be a non-flyball pitcher.

I’m really curious about the fastball.  Can you think of any other reason why his batted ball profile would change so dramatically?

It will be something to keep an eye on in 2010.  If his fastball is actually better than the batting practice meatball we saw last year, he could look a lot better in that fifth spot over the next few years.

It was terrible last year, but we’ll reserve judgement on the fast ball.  He has a quality slider that apparently was a new/improved pitch for him in 2009, and that is something we can look forward to.  The changeup has some promise to be a solid big league pitch.

If he continues to be an extreme flyball pitcher, he will take full advantage of Safeco Field, but without improvement that may not be enough.  He gave up nine homers with Seattle in just 38 innings, five of which were coughed up to righties at his new home ballpark, including a couple of absolute moonshots to Vlad Guerrero and Mark Teixiera.  Right handers will still hit homers at Safeco if the ball is set up on a tee.  But righties hit the ball in the air over half the time against him last season and most of the time that isn’t going to end well given Safeco’s dimensions, the incoming breeze as well as Franklin Gutierrez and Ryan Langerhans or Mike Saunders patrolling that side of the outfield, so maybe he can get lucky.  He keeps lefties on the ground a little more than righties and racks up his fair share of strikeouts against them as well, which will help.

I don’t have high hopes for French in 2010 and don’t really expect him to break camp with the big club given that he has more options to burn compared to Jason Vargas and Garrett Olson (one each), but hopefully there is something missing from his 2009 performance that will explain his minor league track record when he (hopefully) rediscovers his ability to keep the ball on the ground.